Here - Southwark Playhouse
Nov 12, 2022 23:18:32 GMT
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Post by Steve on Nov 12, 2022 23:18:32 GMT
Saw this tonight, and there's a lot of gauze involved. Depending on where you are sitting, your experience will be more or less gauzy. My experience was uber-gauzy, so I mostly heard a radio play with added gauze. The acting sounded superb, and one scene was so gauzy, I'm still trying to guess who played one character. Perhaps that was the intention.
Some spoilers follow. . .
I do enjoy seeing the Papatango prize winner each year if I can. That's the writing prize that guarantees to stage your play, and I've now seen 5 of them at Southwark Playhouse (and a couple of others elsewhere). My favourite by far was, and remains, "Shook," which was devastatingly brilliant, but all have had something to recommend them.
This one is about ghosts, the ones that we grieve and the ones that walk among us that we barely see. It is about us becoming ghosts to others, others becoming ghosts to us, and us becoming ghosts to ourselves. It is about whether we can connect with ourselves, with others and the ghosts we carry with us.
This could have been staged conventionally, with us seeing the micro-expressions of some incredible performances, and internalising the emotions we see. One actor, Sam Baker-Jones, making his stage debut, is undoubtedly giving a phenomenally naturalistic, comedic yet utterly truthful moment to moment performance, but I only know this from utilising my bat skills, focusing on sounds and silences to figure out what he's doing on the other side of that gauze.
For gauze surrounds the whole room, and if you are at a 90 degree angle from the gauze, your view will be better, but if you are at a 45 degree angle, your vision blurs significantly, and from the corner, I had some 10 degree angles where all I could see of some of the stage was shadows and ghosts, moving almost imperceptibly behind the gauze.
The director believes we need ghostly visuals to reflect and emphasise ghostly themes, and though this undoubtedly does render the characters into ghosts, it also elevates every rustle, cough and dropped glass into events that overshadow the stage, as those events are more real than any ghostly events occurring behind the gauze.
There is one corner of the room where characters walk in and out of a door. If you are sat there, you have a window into the stage that is ungauzed, a privilege that will allow you to actually appreciate the acting, to see Lucy Benjamin, who once shot Phil Mitchell on EastEnders, giving a stormingly believable account of alienation. You will be one of a very privileged few, as the rest of us will be piecing the performance together in our minds, only imagining the reality behind the gauze.
Yet perhaps you are the unlucky one, as by viewing the full glorious reality of those astonishing performances, you will be denied the reinforcement of the ghostly themes in the play by the ever present gauze.
This play is impossible to review fairly, so I can only speak to my experience. 3 gauzes from me, mostly for my seat, which I did not choose, but which appropriately, was assigned to me by someone behind the theatrical curtain, some ghostly presence that decided to shower me in gauze lol.
Some spoilers follow. . .
I do enjoy seeing the Papatango prize winner each year if I can. That's the writing prize that guarantees to stage your play, and I've now seen 5 of them at Southwark Playhouse (and a couple of others elsewhere). My favourite by far was, and remains, "Shook," which was devastatingly brilliant, but all have had something to recommend them.
This one is about ghosts, the ones that we grieve and the ones that walk among us that we barely see. It is about us becoming ghosts to others, others becoming ghosts to us, and us becoming ghosts to ourselves. It is about whether we can connect with ourselves, with others and the ghosts we carry with us.
This could have been staged conventionally, with us seeing the micro-expressions of some incredible performances, and internalising the emotions we see. One actor, Sam Baker-Jones, making his stage debut, is undoubtedly giving a phenomenally naturalistic, comedic yet utterly truthful moment to moment performance, but I only know this from utilising my bat skills, focusing on sounds and silences to figure out what he's doing on the other side of that gauze.
For gauze surrounds the whole room, and if you are at a 90 degree angle from the gauze, your view will be better, but if you are at a 45 degree angle, your vision blurs significantly, and from the corner, I had some 10 degree angles where all I could see of some of the stage was shadows and ghosts, moving almost imperceptibly behind the gauze.
The director believes we need ghostly visuals to reflect and emphasise ghostly themes, and though this undoubtedly does render the characters into ghosts, it also elevates every rustle, cough and dropped glass into events that overshadow the stage, as those events are more real than any ghostly events occurring behind the gauze.
There is one corner of the room where characters walk in and out of a door. If you are sat there, you have a window into the stage that is ungauzed, a privilege that will allow you to actually appreciate the acting, to see Lucy Benjamin, who once shot Phil Mitchell on EastEnders, giving a stormingly believable account of alienation. You will be one of a very privileged few, as the rest of us will be piecing the performance together in our minds, only imagining the reality behind the gauze.
Yet perhaps you are the unlucky one, as by viewing the full glorious reality of those astonishing performances, you will be denied the reinforcement of the ghostly themes in the play by the ever present gauze.
This play is impossible to review fairly, so I can only speak to my experience. 3 gauzes from me, mostly for my seat, which I did not choose, but which appropriately, was assigned to me by someone behind the theatrical curtain, some ghostly presence that decided to shower me in gauze lol.
Gggrrr.